New Movies: Monsieur Verdoux

Charlie Chaplin's second talkie hits Philly screens.

Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Mar. 10, 2009

New Releases

Monsieur Verdoux
Directed by Charles Chaplin
A-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., March 13

In 1940’s The Great Dictator, Charles Chaplin, for the first time in eons, played a character who wasn’t a variation on the Little Tramp. Instead, he played Hitler— sort of.

But it was his next character that really turned people off. In 1947, and in his second talkie, Chaplin concocted Monsieur Verdoux, an elegant, charming and otherwise likable gentleman who woos wealthy widows then murders them. (The film was inspired by the serial killer Henri Désiré Landru and, as the story goes, was basically stolen from a script by Orson Welles, who receives only an “idea by” credit.)

Watch the movie on Google video.

Verdoux sort of has a good reason: He’s lost his job in the 1929 stock market crash, and his real family needs food. And as he smilingly points out to the jury that convicts him, compared to the mass killers of the era, he’s “an amateur.”

Audiences and critics of the time weren’t having it, and the notion of a Chaplin comedy whose set-pieces involve murder—coupled with the filmmaker’s scandalous personal life and super-lefty politics—conspired to kill Verdoux as definitively as one of the film’s victims. But black comedy has thrived, partly thanks to Verdoux.

As with Modern Times and The Great Dictator, Chaplin is dead serious; if The Tramp is a logical extension of a cruel capitalist society that can produce a Great Depression, Verdoux is what happens in a world that produces World War II as well.

And yet Verdoux is the lightest film of his career—a seductive bit of fluff that goes easy on the gags and pratfalls in favor of an overall sense of weird fun. Most of the comedy derives from Verdoux’s gift for multitasking. He’s usually plotting multiple murders at once, each one requiring a Herculean amount of organization, and he carries them off with the elegance of a happy professional. (Witness his habit of twinkling his fingers as he counts money.) Verdoux is still no City Lights, but then, what is?

 

 

Not Reviewed

Explicit Ills

Bad shit happens in North Philly in this film by actor-turned-writer/ director Mark Webber. (Opens Fri., March 13.)

The Last House on the Left

The family of a kidnapped girl is really pissed off when they find out she’s been hurt. Fortunately, they know where her attackers are hiding. Here’s a hint: It’s the name of the movie. (Opens Fri., March 13.)

Miss March

An average guy wakes up from a four-year coma to discover that his high school sweetheart has become a centerfold. He and a pal scheme to have the pair reunite in this fantasy film. (Opens Fri., March 13.)

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Posted Mar. 10, 2009 | Comments: 0